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NVIDIA RTX 3090 limited to PCIe Gen 1 speed in VM passthrough

A user on Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA subreddit is experiencing a technical issue where their NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU is only operating at PCIe Gen 1 speeds when passed through to a virtual machine. The GPU functions at its expected Gen 4 speed on the host system (Alpine Linux) but drops to Gen 1 (2.5 GT/s) once the virtual machine (Nobara Linux) is active. The user has attempted several troubleshooting steps, including adjusting QEMU settings and modifying kernel parameters, but has not resolved the problem. They suspect a potential bug within NVIDIA's open kernel modules that causes the PCIe link to retrain to a slower speed upon VM startup. AI

IMPACT This issue impacts users attempting to run local AI models via virtual machines, potentially hindering performance.

RANK_REASON User troubleshooting a specific hardware/software configuration issue for local AI deployment.

Read on r/LocalLLaMA →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

NVIDIA RTX 3090 limited to PCIe Gen 1 speed in VM passthrough

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Signal score
0 / 100
Composite score across the factors below. Higher = stronger signal that this story matters right now.
Newsworthiness bucket
Tool
User troubleshooting a specific hardware/software configuration issue for local AI deployment.
Source corroboration
Single-source cluster
Only one publisher covered this so far. Single-source stories can still rank when the publisher is high-authority, but they lack cross-source corroboration.
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infra
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AI-industry relevance
High
Clearly on-topic for AI-industry coverage.
Story freshness
98 days old
Aged out of breaking-news scoring windows; ranking reflects the durable signal from the full source set.

Full methodology in our editorial standards.

COVERAGE [1]

  1. r/LocalLLaMA TIER_1 English(EN) · /u/FrederikSchack ·

    PCI passthrough only hits gen 1 speed

    <!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I wanted to do some local AI in a VM, so I bought an RTX 3090 and thought it would be possible to make a PCI passthrough. I have done that some years ago with an RTX 3060 and got it to pass through with full speed, so I thought that would be poss…